The shape of strategy stories
Hey – Rob here.
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Last Friday I delivered a short but quite meaningful talk to the strategy team at Not Actual Size. The topic? Not writing strategy. But selling it.
I already teased this last week with a bit of an intro, but this is a fuller set of wider thoughts around a topic which I don't think gets enough attention.
The below is curated from what the Salmon Crew shared with me, and I'm hugely grateful for how they keep stretching my thinking every day.
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Right. Let's get into the hardcore shit.
We're all sales reps
Look, feels sad and insulting, but it's also true. We're all, and always have been, sales reps. But is it actually an insult? Nope. Let's unpack this a bit.
You see, a bit like you I always thought "sales" and "politics" were not my thing. My thing is strategy and strategy is pure while those things are not.
And then I read Dan Pink's 'To Sell Is Human' and eventually stopped having my head so up my own ass, and completely changed my mind.
Of course, we need to qualify what we mean by "sales" and "politics" here. Your job isn't to just do them. It's to use them to land your thinking.
So if your job as a strategist is to sell but you don't have a P&L, sales target or profit margin target attached to your job role, what do you sell?
You sell ways of thinking
You sell ways of working
You sell arguments
You sell ideas
You sell simplicity
You sell leaps
You sell the need to act
You sell the need to do nothing (yes, sometimes this is the job!)
This may sound obvious but I think it's an important reframe, especially if we're still under the assumption that our role is to bring "the smart bits".
Yeah, sorry but no. Our job isn't to sound smart, it's to help others be smart. We help others be smart by convincing them to do things.
And we only convince them to do things if we – you guessed it – learn how to sell and use politics to our advantage (instead of them using you).
"Interesting" is a big no-no
I'm heavily borrowing here from Martin Stellar when I say this: someone saying a strategy is "interesting" is not a red flag, but it can be orange-y.
Why? Because you don't want someone who merely finds your work "interesting". You want someone invested in making it a real thing.
Therefore yes, you and me are in sales, but our job is to deliver something that others can sell on our behalf within their businesses too.
In other terms, we're tasked with representing the audiences we sell to out there, but we also need to orient our thinking for the customer in here.
If we don't, we fall on a few classic danger ones:
Over-analysing the problem
Burying ideas in research
Staying too high level
Getting too tactical too quickly
Every time we make mistakes like these, it's more than our ego that suffers. We lose time. Get scope creep. And yes, morale eventually tanks.
So rather than forever worry that we're stepping on a minefield, there are a few simple premises and practices that can help us manage our own mind.
Strategy is a shared truth
Here's something harsh to hear: no one cares if you're right. They don't. What they care is whether they believe you enough to pass it on.
Strategists love to obsess with the truth, and sure our work needs to be grounded in it. But it's arrogant to think our truth is the only one there is.
It's a bit like saying my way of living my life is the only way there is. It's deeply contextual. The same thing is true for strategic choices out there.
So if what wins isn't the (capital T) truth, what does? A good story. Now, I'm not going all woo-woo and say we're all storytellers. But also, I am.
With a twist, that is! And a few more practical thoughts, because just saying we're all storytellers and then not going deeper is a bit of a downer.
You know when Kurt Vonnegut talked about the shape of stories? I did something fun with these shapes, and possibly even correct and useful.
I turned them – you guessed it – into the shape of strategy stories. Now let's see if they hold up to scrutiny. I think they do, but you tell me.
The shape of strategy stories
In Mr V's thesis, there are basically eight shapes of stories: man in hole, boy meets girl, from bad to worse, which way is up, creation story, old testament, new testament, and Cinderella. Lovely stuff, right?
So how might these shapes be applicable for when we're trying to get to a clear, memorable strategy story that people can truly get invested in?
Man In Hole Person In Hole (it's 2025 after all). This is a basic Problem → Confront it → Emerge stronger. Useful for projects that require a repositioning, turnaround, crisis management.
Boy Meets Girl Person Meets Person (again, 2025). A slightly different shape. Found love → Lost it → Earn it back. This could be useful when you're trying to revive an old brand, relaunch an old product, or do a reappraisal job for a once-loved organisation.
Bad To Worse. This one wasn't easy because who wants their strategy to take a client somewhere worse? But actually, it's the classic 'firestarter' challenger brand. Problem → Cost of not solving it → How we solve it. That last part is a bit of a cheat but basically to stick with the incumbents is how you get to worse, etc.
Which Way Is Up? This one is quite dear to my heart, as I recently worked out I prefer projects where the brief is to take complex things and simplify them, than to take simple things and exaggerate them. The shape here is simple. Everything’s confusing → We simplify. Generally good for service categories and B2B.
Creation Story. Another tricky one because it's a shape that is less seen in Western literature, so I defined it as this. Small sparks → Bigger worlds. It's how fashion houses build their equity (it doesn't need to make sense, just to immerse you). It's also possibly how new category creators operate. I'm on the fence about this one.
Old Testament. No, there are no punishments for your own children here or whatever. The shape here is something like this. Had a gift → Misused it → Consequences → Responsibility. For me it's the classic cultural backlash brief, or when you have a safety breach, or a PR disaster that you need to overcome.
New Testament. This one is a more straightforward story. Its structure is something like this. Fall → Redemption → New hope. Quite close to 'person in hole', but for the sake of variety I see democratiser challenger brands playing here. They recognise certain things are good, but fell from grace (e.g. became too exclusive), so redemption and new hope comes thru new players.
Cinderella. Last but not least, and no there are no crystal shoes here either (although that'd be a fun office etiquette thing). The shape here is as follows. Rise → Setback → Bigger comeback. This one for me is the classic scale-up challenge or comeback brand, where you didn't quite fall from grace, but fell a bit short.
Choices not prescriptions
The point of this exercise isn't to say some of these are better than others, but rather that for every projects you're operating in a specific story shape.
And you may interpret them in different ways, of course you can (and I welcome you to!), but once you do then they're already doing their job.
Which isn't to prescribe a specific shape of story, but rather to get you thinking that you do need a clear story if you want it to spread internally.
And now that you know you need a story, your job is to find it and sharpen it as best you can. At least you now know broadly what you're aiming for.
How do your clients buy things?
A final word not on how we tell a story about what we have to sell, but more on how our clients like to buy stories. Not quite the same thing.
We always assume clients want or expect a deck, but in my experience over the last 12 months this may sometimes feel like a blunt tool.
Sure, 95% of the time the answer is a deck, but then what type of deck? And even if it's the right type of deck, what happens internally afterwards?
The way I see it, there are three elements worth thinking about.
Contents. Do clients want to see logic, so each step naturally leads to the next? Inspiring leaps, where feeling is more important than logic? Do they need everything backed by evidence? What kind of evidence do they typically rely on? How much is too much?
Formats. Sure, they might want a deck. But in which instances do they prefer a quick chat before you get back into slide mode? Are there scenarios where a one-pager will be the great unlock? On a client project earlier this year I saw this. Slides after slides didn't lead to the same level of alignment that a printed write up could.
Politics. The selling in the room is not the same as what happens outside the room. Do your clients operate like a democracy, where everyone needs to feel heard? Or is it an autocracy, where a few power players dictate what goes ahead or not? Or is it – I've made this word up but it's based on a real example – an align-ocracy, where clients don't need to feel everyone's heard, but rather that the right people are aligned and therefore they can feel aligned too?
The long and the short of it is, our job is to convince people to make decisions, and so that – more than "being right" – should be the endgame.
This is the list of thoughts I wish I had when I was in my mid-20s, constantly frustrated that everyone else "didn't get" my recommendations.
Turns out, always blaming people for not buying your thing is not as smart a tactic as we think. It feels good for a minute, then back to feeling shit.
We don't do it for external audiences ("our ad flopped cos our customers are idiots who just don't get it"), yet we normalise this for internal ones.
I think we can and should do better. So here's a start to get you going too. Also means less frustration and cortisol in our systems. Which feels nice.
Keep swimming,
Rob
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